


where the heart is

by lyricalprose (fairylights)



Series: 2013 Fic Advent Calendar [4]
Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: 2013 Fic Advent Calendar, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-05
Updated: 2013-12-05
Packaged: 2018-01-03 13:06:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,169
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1070795
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fairylights/pseuds/lyricalprose
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After Scotland and Queen Victoria and the werewolf, they go to a planet called Dyrellis, where the sky is green and the particular chemical composition of the atmosphere makes the stars look like flakes of gold. The people there live high in the mountains, in structures without roofs or windows – the better to see the sky, they say.</p><p>A child there asks Rose, “where do <i>you</i> live?”, and she says, “in a time machine.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	where the heart is

**Author's Note:**

> Anonymous asked “Doctor/Rose, home.”
> 
> Fill #4 for my 2013 fic advent calendar.

It doesn’t really hit her until Jack comes aboard.  
  
She’s showing him around the TARDIS, giving the grand tour that the Doctor is either too lazy or too ornery to give. It’s not the first time Rose has given the tour. She showed Adam around too, all those months ago. Jack, though, is fascinated by the ship in a way Adam never was. He looks at it the way the Doctor does, with wonder, like it’s something precious.  
  
The TARDIS seems to have recognized Jack’s appreciation. There’s a room just a few halls down from Rose’s own bedroom with Jack’s name written on the door. It’s much more well-appointed than the spartan guest room they’d found made up for Adam – this room is all deep blue walls and plush leather furnishings, and Jack hums appreciatively at the sight. Then he promptly flops down on the large bed in the middle of the room, grins at her, and asks, “So, where do you and the Doctor sleep?”  
  
Rose feels a flush of embarrassment bloom on her cheeks. “We’re not – we don’t–” she stammers, flailing for the right words. What eventually comes out is a mumbled, “I sleep just a few halls over. We’re – it’s not like that.”  
  
Jack’s grin widens. “Aw, c’mon, Rosie.” He sits up for a moment to take his hat off and toss it onto the bedside table, then settles back onto the bed. “I’m a modern man. No judgment here.”  
  
Rose fights down the blush she can feel continuing to rise and says, as firmly as she can manage, “Really, Jack. It’s not like that. We just travel together, is all.”  
  
Jack’s smile falters a little, but he isn’t deterred. “You do _live_ here, though, right?” His smile turns wolfish. “Just the two of you, living together, on this great big ship?”  
  
Rose glares at him, but there’s no real heat in it. “Goodnight, _Captain._ ”  
  
Back in her own room, Rose takes a minute to look around at the mess she’s made of the place.  
  
Somehow, a backpack stuffed with basic clothes and toiletries, hastily packed before leaving her mum’s, has morphed into a whole _life_ spread out across this room. There are photos tacked to the vanity mirror and slippers under the edge of the bed, magazines stacked on the bedside table and a closet packed full of clothes, most of which aren’t even from Earth. Rose isn’t just along for the ride, not anymore – she’s _moving in_ here, and she hadn’t really even noticed it happening.  
  
Rose hadn’t lied, when Jack asked. She and the Doctor _aren’t_ like that. They aren’t _living together,_ not in the way she’s always understood the phrase. She’d _lived_ with Jimmy, and this isn’t anything like that; there are no curry-and-chips takeaway dinners on settees with broken springs, no warm summer nights spent curled up together on too-small beds. There are no arguments about whose turn it is to do the washing up, no space made for her things in bathroom counters or dresser drawers.  
  
There _certainly_ aren’t any shags on the kitchen counter or long, lazy snogs over tea in the mornings. Then again, there aren’t any screaming rows, either – unless sniping at each other over the best way to get out of a jail cell counts.  
  
But she sees him every day, over breakfast in the galley, spends more time with him than quite literally anyone else in the universe. She knows how he takes his tea and that he hardly ever sleeps and that he likes having her there in the console room, while he tinkers with the TARDIS.  
  
She knows that there’s no place in the world she’d rather be.  
  
—-  
  
After Christmas, there’s no longer any pretense made that she only _travels_ with the Doctor and lives at her mum’s. The new backpack full of things that she brings onto the the TARDIS does have some changes of clothes – does have a pair of trainers, and a new tube of mascara, and the pink nail polish she’s been missing – but mostly it’s little things that the TARDIS and their travels can’t replace for her, like photos of her mum and birthday letters from her gran and the little china bird Cousin Mo gave her when she was eleven.  
  
Anything she leaves behind, she leaves because she’s decided she doesn’t really need it.  
  
They’re still not snogging, or shagging, or doing anything out of the ordinary – except calling the same place home.  
  
After Scotland and Queen Victoria and the werewolf, they go to a planet called Dyrellis, where the sky is green and the particular chemical composition of the atmosphere makes the stars look like flakes of gold. The people there live high in the mountains, in structures without roofs or windows – the better to see the sky, they say.  
  
A child there asks Rose, “where do _you_ live?”, and she says, “in a time machine.”  
  
(Saying “London” or “England” or “Earth” doesn’t even cross her mind).  
  
—-  
  
Rose gets her own flat, in the parallel world.  
  
It’s a little studio place, a few blocks from Torchwood, and no matter how much time she spends there – which, by the time the stars are going out, isn’t much – it never really feels like a _home._ She doesn’t paint the walls or put up art or hang curtains. She has a bed and a futon and a telly, and there are some cheap plastic dishes in the cupboards that she hardly ever uses. There’s a half-empty bookshelf in the living room that Rose uses more as an open-air junk drawer than a place to keep books.  
  
She’d tried looking for a place that reminded her of the TARDIS, at first – something spacious but not too bright, with lots of room and a view of the stars and maybe in need of a bit of fixing up – but the search had only made her more depressed, every option only seeming to scream _wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong._  
  
Jackie hadn’t wanted her to move out of the mansion at all, but she hasn’t lived with her mum in so long that it feels almost as wrong as the flats that aren’t the TARDIS. The flats, though they’re missing something she can’t manufacture, at least don’t make her feel like a child falling back on old haunts and habits. In the end, she picks the studio because it’s was a blank slate, empty and uninteresting, with no memories or expectations attached.  
  
Then – then there’s a dark sky and the Dimension Cannon and a _good-bye-hello_ on that stupid bloody beach. Then Rose wakes up one morning and the Doctor is sitting up next to her in bed – bare-chested, with sleep-mussed hair, peering down at a newspaper through his glasses. Then they eat pancakes off her cheap plastic dishes and the Doctor makes a home for the TARDIS coral on her all-purpose bookshelf and they attempt to shag on the futon before realizing it’s terribly uncomfortable and moving to the bed.  
  
Then, she’s home.


End file.
